Hacker Cinema
Rock-A-Doodle
1991 · Film · 74 min
Directed by Don Bluth
ComedyFamilyAnimationFantasyMusic
Chanticleer is a foolhardy farm rooster who believes his crows can actually make the sun come up and shine. When the sun rises one morning without Chanticleer's crow, he leaves the farm in disgrace and runs off to become a rock 'n' roll singer. But in his absence, a sinister, sunshine-hating owl prepares to take over.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Even the "Bad" bluth films are excellent. Rock a doodle do is a solid 8.5+/10 and I straight up think critics who leave that film with a bad rating are deluded.
Porco Rosso literally reuses music, animations, etc from his other films. I enjoyed the film because a fascist pig cassanova was a fascinating premise - but it's very much derivative.
I bench them against one another because my partner is obsessed with Miyazaki and finds Bluth films to be mundane in comparison. Miyazaki has far more cultural capital today than bluth - which is absurd since more Americans grew up watching the land before time than they did watching anything Miyazaki made.
If you didn't grow up with Bluth's work and only know his studio's output from the later years (the unyielding torrent of direct to video Land Before Time sequels)...you really owe it to yourself to watch his studio's earlier stuff. It came at the moment where he had just struck off from Disney, disenfranchised by the output of the other major animation houses, and has his clearest vision.
The Secret of NIMH is, IMHO, one of the finest animated movies ever made, but An American Tail, the original Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven are all masterpieces in the own and couldn't really be matched in terms of narrative and animation excellence until the early Pixar movies. They definitely have a distinct aesthetic and a certain style of animation and storytelling unique to the production house.
They lost their way somewhere, I think it was Rock-a-Doodle, and the studio just started hemorrhaging money and losing connection with their audience. Their last two major gasps were Anastasia, a beautifully animated film with a poorly targeted audience demographic and Titan A.E., an ambition mixed-media project, which apparently ran out of money (among other problems) during production and resulted in some hilariously bad computer generated graphics at the end but I think stands up better than Disney's Treasure Planet response.
In the end, the studio floated themselves on cheaply produced, but child friendly, direct to video sequels of The Land Before Time, which is notable as being an unbroked series of sequels dating from 1988 to 2016 which at least has had the advantage of being a series of characters I can share with nieces and nephews who also grew up with the same characters...almost like Star Wars.
Interesting.
The nice thing about the Orwell review for me is that by explicitly talking about the atomic bomb and spelling it out for me in that context, it led me to an understanding of a lot of other cultural output (especially film) over the next few decades. Star Trek IV? Oh, that space probe that's out to destroy the world is a symbol for the atomic bomb. (I had some help from the boombox quip about how "we'll all be crispy critters after WORLD WAR III.") Blade Runner? Is about living with the expectation your life could end tomorrow. Aliens? Is about the destruction of civilization. And it's not just hardcore sci-fi. Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing? Besides the fact that it's more cinematic, perhaps the director was pondering the promise and perils of science, especially atomic weapons and atomic energy. Flippin' Rock-a-doodle? I'm thinking 'nuclear winter'.
You just don't get that same flavor with things produced after the mid-eighties.